My parents had the plan for my life from the moment my mother tested positive with me. Looking back now, I'd say the hard turn for me was when I left school after the eighth grade to play tennis full time and study some with a travelling tutor.
My tennis is aggressive, though I wouldn't say that it's more physical than technical. I rely more on technique than physique, but being physical is always a help to me.
Nick Kyrgios, if you don't want to be a professional tennis player, do something else.
Tennis is my life, obviously; I need to focus, I need to win. But it's not the only thing. I'm not going to play forever.
Women's tennis has been around for a very long time - we're talking about the 1800s. But women's soccer hasn't had such a long history, so now they're right at the beginning of really trying to make things equal. We need to continue not only to advocate for women but to have men advocating for women.
I train Monday through Saturday. I usually have fitness training for 90 minutes, then I'm on the tennis court for 3 to 4 hours.
It is a time for women's tennis to return to the light, as it were, and be on a par with men's tennis, which is at a very high level.
I've been around tennis, and I have a feeling for the sport. I still play tennis, and I can still do a lot of harm to a lot of people.
The thing is, it's not good anyway for eight-year-olds to be out there playing tennis tournaments so soon in their lives. But when I did get to play in a tournament, when I was nine, I was overjoyed.
Every time I am off the tennis tour, I go back home.
I bought my Grasshoppers tennis shoes at a flea market in Brooklyn. They are so comfortable to lounge around in on tour.
I have never been a fan of science fiction. For me, fiction has to explore the combinatorial possibilities of people interacting under the constraints imposed by our biology and history. When an author is free to suspend the constraints, it's tennis without a net.
You are always talking about yourself and tennis and how you are feeling. I try to avoid it when I don't have to.
I didn't realize until I was doing commentary what a gladiator-like competition tennis is - other than no one dies. The crowd is waiting for the players to come, and they walk through the tunnel, and they get on the court, and they get out their rackets, their weapons, and now they start.
I got picked on a lot. I was a complete geek in school. I had braces. I didn't have the hot girlfriend. I wasn't ever sought after. I was a stocky, awkward kid who got laughed off the tennis court when I tried that.
I would like to thank all my tennis fans who were there from Day One when I was No. 1, through my stabbing, and my comeback.
While I'm more of a soccer and tennis fan myself, I still enjoying catching some football games when I get the chance.
My body is for my tennis - it's for my sport. I'm not a model at all. I don't work out to go to the beach: I work out to play well and to do well on the court.
I learnt tennis, swimming, basketball and several others, but the sport I loved the most was golf.
I'd like to be the commissioner of tennis, but do I want to get into politics? Sometimes I have delusions of grandeur that that would be an interesting, good thing. I'm talking about actual politics, like being a congressman, but then I see how unbelievably nasty it really is, and maybe I'm not quite knowledgeable enough to actually do it.
When I'm doing sports, I always think of how it's related to singing, and when I watch tennis, I learn a lot for my singing: how the players are focused, how they use their technique, and, in the case of Roger Federer, how effortless it is and how beautiful it is to watch - like bel canto, in a way. That's how singing should be.
Tennis was always there for me, which was lucky. I would go play baseball, basketball, football, hang with my brother, do whatever, and at the end of the day I'd come back and say, 'Hey, Mom, would you hit 15 minutes worth of balls with me?'
The tennis wasn't really very much on my mind, so it wasn't like I was thinking about it all the time.
I just enjoy watching tennis. And there's things that you can learn from the men's and the women's game.
There was never anything I wanted to do more than play tennis. Never once walked out there and thought, 'I wish I was doing something else.' Not once.
I don't have time for easy. Tennis is just hard.
I can teach many sports, but obviously, tennis is the one. When you do other sports, you see things from different perspectives: different footwork drills, body positions, angles and geometry. All that stuff is helpful, and so when I do other sports, I can see things, because once you know one sport, then the other sport becomes more clear.
Later, I discovered there was a lot of work to being good in tennis.
My only wish would be to have 10 more lives to live on this planet. If that were possible, I'd spend one lifetime each in embryology, genetics, physics, astronomy and geology. The other lifetimes would be as a pianist, backwoodsman, tennis player, or writer for the 'National Geographic.'
Women's tennis? I think it stinks. They hit the ball back and forth, have a lot of nice volleys, and you can see some pretty legs. But it's night and day compared to men's tennis.
I love being outdoors, playing beach tennis, going for runs in the sand, or doing a three-hour hike with my best girlfriend, Mieko.
When I'm sitting at home in the off season and I don't have anything to do, I watch tennis on my computer. It's kind of boring. It's something to do.
The drop shots and lobs are very effective in senior tennis.
We have a lot of great lesbian role models in tennis. I mean, Martina Navratilova in her heyday was probably the greatest female athlete on the planet. Martina just kept breaking every rule. That's a great role model.
The poet Melvin B. Tolson once said, 'A civilization is judged only in its decline.' That made sense to me. I would imagine the same is true for poets and tennis players.
Tennis players go into a press conference, and almost every one of them is the same. We do very little differently on a day-to-day basis.
